Wildfire: A Novel

CHAPTER 1

Thunderstruck

I didn’t know where my limbs were. I had no edges between inside and out, I was a heaviness that swayed, plummeted. Was lifted, fell again. Nothing steady anywhere.

I heard shouting, but couldn’t disentangle words from the crashing and rumbling and shrieking and roaring that filled everywhere.

Everywhere but here. Here was silence.

The silence. What was wrong about it, what was missing: breath, blood throb, heartbeat.

A buzzing in my ear. They say you’re dead.

The buzz was intimate, it crawled in the whorl of my ear, so I knew I had an ear. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Dead, dead, dead. Left ear or right, within or without, I couldn’t tell exactly.

It was the only voice that made sense in all the clamor. It must be true that I was dead, for I no longer understood the speech of the living. I never knew the dead had a language of their own.

The droning persisted. Your heart forgot to beat, it said.

I didn’t recognize the voice, but I recognized its gleeful malice. It belonged to a man I knew well, though I had somehow mislaid his name. A man I detested. A man I had killed.

His was the only shade to greet me. I would have wept, but to weep takes breath.

If I was dead, I must go. I mustn’t tarry.

I willed myself to rise. But my will had come undone from flesh and shade alike, and I couldn’t move.

Nevertheless, something stirred within me, a small disturbance. And though this thing seemed weak, it found an opening in my heaviness and forced its way out. Was that my shade? That tiny frail fretful creature? How could it leave me behind?

Oh gods, no. It wasn’t my shade. It was my last breath departing.

Sheesdeadintshe?

Ithosheedbeburntup.

Donstanthergawkin! Covererup!

My friend knelt beside me and I knew her voice, and felt her great bulk near me. She dug her fingers under the corners of my jaw, and by her touch I felt my skin fastened to my skull, I knew the shape of my own face again. She said, Firethorn! Cmoncmonbreathe! Iswearyorheartsbeatin.

I took in a shallow breath and I wasn’t numb anymore. Ropes of pain tightened around my chest. I wanted to hold on to that breath forever, but I had to let it go.

The next breath was a long time coming. And the next.

I awoke. There was no part of me that didn’t hurt. I wouldn’t open my eyes. I feared what I might see, the confusion of it.

I swallowed. It was a victory to command that least little act.

A cloth settled over me, rough and scratchy. It was outside, I was inside, I was flesh again, and the boundary of skin between me and all else was raw, exquisitely tender.

I lay on my side, drawn up tight from spasms, taking shallow breaths because a deep breath was like tearing something open. I thought my friend was rocking me, rocking me so hard I feared falling from my bed. I heard her saying, Podeahmydeahomydeahpodeah. As if I were a child. I opened my eyes and saw her broad face looming over me. A crystalline nimbus flared around her head. Words were given shape by her lips: Poor dear! Her daughter was there too, and the boy, his hand wrapped in his mother’s dress. The sky flashed, too white, too bright. I closed my eyes and saw a green throb. Sound spilled over us and drained away.

The girl dabbed a cloth under my ear. It came away red.

There were men watching, jabbering. I should have been able to understand them. I was no longer dead.

My friend wiped her eyes on her headcloth. She took my hands between hers and began to chafe them, saying, Yorhandsersocold. Podeah. Ithotardorhadkilledyu. It hurt, it hurt. I pulled my left hand away, but the right hand wouldn’t answer to me. The shadows around the edges of everything flickered and closed in.

If I was alive, why did the shade still pester me? I heard him hissing, in a fury that he’d been cheated of my death; I saw him too, and he was nothing but a fly, a manfly, a shade so puny his mightiest shout was a mere bzzzzz. He darted about, circling my head. I almost laughed at him.

But when I slept, he was huge and heavy and his rage nearly swallowed me whole. He lay down on me backward, my bones a scaffold for his weight. He braced his knee against my throat and stoppered up my breath while he took his trophy, flesh from the woman’s beard at my groin. He sawed away at a flap of skin covered with tightly coiled coppery hairs. He smelt of the sour sweat of a sick man. I choked and coughed and tried to push him off me. This happened again and again.

I awoke. He was still there, droning in my left ear. A sound I couldn’t banish. I would have killed him again, if a shade could be killed. I moaned. The sound worked its way out of me, into the tumult of the wind and waves, and was carried away.

Above my friend’s head I saw a tall tree with one broken branch. Petals of snow fell from a white sky and I was soothed by their cold touch on my brow. Perhaps I said, What happened? She leaned toward me, but when she spoke, I heard a different voice—I thought it was her unborn child. He said, Wildfire ate you. I was delighted he spoke so clearly.

I awoke. This time it was dark. I was being rocked. A cradle. A ship.

My head was pillowed on Mai’s thigh. She was there with me, she’d been there always when I awoke. She rested against a wooden wall with her head tilted back. For a moment I couldn’t make sense of her face, seeing it from underneath: the soft swags of flesh under her chin, the darkness within her nostrils and her open mouth, the pale swelling cheeks that hid her eyes. Her breathing was loud, whistling.

I turned onto my back. I could move both legs, but my numb right arm didn’t obey me. I picked up my right hand with my left and let it rest, curled up, on my belly. My other limbs ached with a bone-deep ache. I held my left hand before my face. The skin had cracked open between my fingers and along the deep creases of the palm, but the cracks were dry, not bloody.

The sea slapped the hull of the ship.

I looked at the tree. The mast. As the ship rolled, the mast tilted overhead, and the lopsided moon slipped through the net of rigging. Stars shimmied like minnows.

Mai’s daughter sat nearby. Her eyes glistened. She leaned toward me and said, Firethorn, aruthursti?

Aruthursti. Aru thursti. Thursti. Thirsty.

I slept and slept, I slept so long that I was confused by the twilight I saw on awakening. Was it evening or dawn? The blushing sun hovered by the horizon as if undecided whether to sink or rise, and I, who had always known east from west without giving it a thought, didn’t know which way we sailed as we sailed away from her. I was unmoored. I was on the ship, but where was the ship on the sea and when were we in the day?

The sea wasn’t a place, it was a terrifying in between, without landmarks, nothing fixed. The waves went rolling away, nothing to them but motion.

The storm had chased the fleet in every direction like wolves among sheep. Suppose the helmsman too was lost?

I drank ale from a curved shell that stood on a silver tail chased with scales. I devoured the flesh of a porpoise, and wheaten pottage dyed gold with saffron, and then five minnows in pastry, one after the other, so many because they were so small. Still I was hungry. And so thirsty.

I sent my left hand under the scratchy blanket to make an exploration. I found smooth skin. I touched, naming throat and breast and nipple and navel and belly and cleft and thighs. Under my fingers the skin was roused to a sensation just shy of an itch. Hard to bear. A teasing pain. The right hand lay useless on my belly, colder than the other flesh. It didn’t belong to me.

I was not clad in garments, but there were rags twisted around my legs and shoulders. The edges of the cloth crumbled between my fingers. Why? Charred. Burnt. My fingers sorted the rags into smooth thin and soft thick, which I recognized as kinds of fabric, though I could not at the moment name them. Fire had shredded my clothing. Why wasn’t I burned too?

This I’d seen before, how one thing burned while another was spared, one lived while another died.

I found a burn on my left hip. The skin was raw and blistered, and as soon as I touched the wound, it insisted on hurting. I peeked at it under the blanket. The burn was shaped like the blade of a knife.

I remembered the storm. Thunder and lightning and snow and wind and waves and then nothing.

And all these memories of sleeping and waking, waking and dreaming, daylight and darkness and daylight—they were as jumbled as beads in a sack, and I couldn’t string one after another. I had no idea of how long.

I loaded ashes in a barrow on a cloudy day, and trundled along the rutted path to the terrace just below the house. I meant to plant herbs there. The crows raised a fuss at me, jeering, Whah! There she goes, there she goes! I scattered ashes over the dun hay stubble. I noticed the roof of the house had a slate missing; I needed to see to that. My shoulders ached. I warmed my hands in my sleeves, and watched two crows play chase-the-wagtail. The air smelled of clean cold. Snow was coming.

My forgetfulness was vast, beyond reckoning. I lay awake in the dark, making an inventory of what I could remember.

I made lists of names: Firethorn, Sire Galan. Mai, her daughter Sunup, her son Tobe. Mai’s cataphract, Sire Ferocious. The shade, the fly—Sire Rodela.

Ship, mast, sail.

I knew I was aboard a ship. I knew Galan wasn’t here. Where was he?

I tried to conjure him beside me, the unruly hair falling over his brow, his eyes giving me a look. His eyelids tilted downward at the outer corners; sometimes this made him seem lazy or amused when he was not. Then there was the proud line of his nose, never yet broken, and the lips indented at the corners; the thin white scar under his jaw and his long neck with the beating pulse; the way he wore the laces of his surcoat loose so that the pleated gauze shirt spilled out at his chest and sleeves. I would untie a green-dyed leather thong and pull it free from the embroidered eyelets of his surcoat, and then untie the white cord of his shirt below the notch at the base of his throat. Under his shirt I would find skin paler than his face.

His strong long fingers, elegant but for the scars, the thickening at the knuckles. A warrior’s hands. The hard palms.

I saw him by glimpses, pieced together, mismatched. My summoning didn’t quell the longing, it made me restless, shifting against the hard planks under my hip. I touched my hand to my mouth, seeking the taste of his last touch.

It sometimes happens in battle that a soldier doesn’t know he’s been stabbed, and only later feels a weakness come over him and finds the wound in his side—so I’d been surprised to find I was smitten by Galan, after I lay with him behind a hedge on a festival night. Easy to find, easy to forget, we say of such chance meetings during the UpsideDown Days.

Galan refused to be forgotten.

A bird perched in the rigging and sang, I live, I live, I live! It was nothing but a small puff of feathers, the possessor of a single song that it offered to the wind with all its might. It was a long way from any shore. Surely it would stay with us until landfall rather than dare to cross so much water again. But it flew off, out of sight. I used to know what sort of bird it was.

The sun climbed behind us, and therefore we were sailing west. She sent a ray of light through a gap in the clouds and struck my eyes.

I remembered. We were sailing west and to war.

Tobe was crying and Sunup was trying to feed him porridge. Tobe and Sunup. Naming people fastened them to me, and fastened me to where I was.

So much noise nearly drowned out the buzzing of Sire Rodela. Everyone and everything talking at once, Tobe wailing and Sunup coaxing and waves mumbling against the hull and wind whispering through the rigging and drudges chattering and sailors shouting. My head hurt.

A man said, Lukaterwillyu? Thotsheedsleepfrever. He was standing up, looking down on me. He was swaying—the ship was swaying, he was standing still, holding on to ropes. I picked at the noise to separate his voice from the hubbub. I understood the rough tune and tone of his speech: the rise and fall of question and statement, the nasal lilt of mockery, and even the humming undertone of fondness. Then, after a delay, I understood the words: Look at her, will you? Thought she’d sleep forever.

I knew that fellow; he was named Trave, and he was one of Mai’s varlets, or rather he served her cataphract. But already others were speaking, more than one at once, and the wind roistered about and scattered their words out of reach.

Pinch said, Didjasee howt jumptoer? Thlightning jumptoerboom! and he clapped, En thruerdown, thruercros thedeck. Sheotta bedead, and meanwhile the waves said, Shushshushshush, and a gull said, Aship aship plentitoeat, in a long fading caw overhead, and Mai said, Leaver alone. She elbowed Trave out of the way and leaned toward me. Canyu situp? Sit up?

My limbs were feeble and slow to obey. My right arm trembled and refused to help bear my weight. I panted.

Mai said, Can you hear me? I thought maybe you went deaf onaccounta you were bleeding from anear.

When I concentrated on Mai and watched her lips move, I could understand. Mostly. But it was laborious.

The blanket slipped and Mai pulled it up around my neck and over my shoulders.

I tried to speak. What, what…what upended…what opened? I knew just what I meant to say, yet I couldn’t find the right words or the sounds to make them. Words seemed far away, and I had to travel toward them with slow, halting steps. This vexed me. I tried again. What…hammered…hampered?

Mai didn’t seem to notice. Lightning blew you out of your slippers—picked you up enflungu enufetcht up in a heap. You looked deadas dead, your clothes alburntintatters. I’ve never seen such a sight before and I hope I never do again. Nothing broken, praise the gods. You couldve split open your skull! But yortufasan old root.

I lifted my left hand, my obedient hand, and she pressed it against her cheek.

I’m glad, Coz, she said. So glad you’re better.

I wanted to be glad. But I was afraid. I’d become a laggard, a simpleton.

I sat on a rower’s bench and stared at the sea, the smooth swells that lifted us and passed on, and smaller waves that crossed the swells at an angle. Now and then three large waves would march by, one after another, adorned by whitecaps. Behind us a spreading fantail of ripples broke the surface of the water into blue and gray slivers of light.

After the chaos of the storm, it was soothing to see the distinct and orderly patterns of the waves, which reminded me of designs weavers made from the play of warp and weft, color and interval. Was this what sailors saw when they looked at the sea, did they recognize and name these patterns as weavers named theirs? Though I could not, just now, name one design among the many the Dame had so painstakingly taught me. The names were gone, and all that remained was the memory of the quiet in the weaving room, and the steady growth of order as the shuttle crossed back and forth between the warp threads.

There were ships about us with their sails full of wind. And coming nearer, bobbing in our wake, things that marred the pattern of the waves: drowned men, broken spars, an upturned hull black with pitch.

Mai tried to pull a garment over my head, one of her winter underdresses. I wanted to help, but my right arm was so weak I couldn’t raise it above my head. Though I could twitch the fingers of my right hand, which pleased me so much that I wept, saying, See how the little ones, the…the diddles…the fidgets—how do you call them?—the things that finger things, see how they fiddle now!

Sunup and I could have fit inside Mai’s dress together and left room for another. Even so, I was grateful to be covered, for it had occurred to me, somewhat too late, to feel shame at my nakedness. Mai hitched up the skirts about my waist so they wouldn’t trail on the deck, for she was considerably taller than me, and she pleated the bodice, tying it about me with crisscrossed cords the color of new-minted copper. Such was her skill that it looked as if it were meant to be that way, or so she said with satisfaction, And not as if you’re a foul trust for roasting. She fashioned a headcloth for me from a scrap of the green wool dress I’d been wearing.

Foul trust? I puzzled over that.

Fowl trussed for roasting. Always this gap between sound and sense.

I’ve no shoes to fit you, Mai said. She handed me a heavy cloth sack on a long cord.

What’s these things? I could feel hard disks through the cloth.

Mai laughed. Why, it’s everything of yours I could find. I think I got most of the money you’d stitched into your hem and seams, all but what some light-fingered whoreson sowpricker of a sailor found first. But your girdle and all that you carried in it were destroyed. So you take this. She searched under her skirts and brought out an oilskin packet. I had saved some for myself, but I shan’t be needing it until after the child is born, and maybe by then you’ll have found some more. You’ll be wanting it yourself soon, I daresay. She winked and I took the packet from her.

I unfolded it and saw two handfuls of white, black-eyed berries. I thought I should know what they were, but I’d misplaced the meaning as well as the word. I looked at Mai.

You don’t know what they are?

I shrugged. Mai tucked me under her arm and pulled me close. I rested against the great sloping shelf of her bosom. Ah, Coz, poor dear! You gave me these berries. They’re childbane, and you and I sold them all over the Marchfield to whores and dames alike, to keep them from conceiving. You truly don’t remember?

Truly, truly, Mine…Mai, I mean. My throat closed up. There are, there are…it’s as if my find is full of halts, you see? My my empery is like my…drapes…the cloth thing I wore—all charred. It’s holey.

She gave me a little shake. You’re upside down and backward now, but you’ll get better. It was a gift, you’ll see. Once the rumormongers get hold of the tale, everyone will know that Ardor Wildfire gave you a big blessed buss, that you’re thunderstruck.

You call this a…blissing? A besting?

The god branded your cheek with lightning and left you lopsided. A lopsided face is a sure sign of a cannywoman, and every harlot in the army will seek your advice, and be willing to pay dear for it too.

Mai had called me a canny before, and this time I didn’t trouble to deny it; but why did she call me lopsided? I touched my face and discovered my mouth was sagging on the right. I pinched my cheek hard. My face is just slipping. Sleeping. Surely it will wake!

She said, It comes out muddled, doesn’t it? She still had her arm around me. I pulled away, hearing mirth in her voice as well as sympathy. I couldn’t bear to be laughed at just now.

Mai was a canny herself, I remembered that much, and she was lopsided too. I wondered I’d never noticed it before. The left side of her face had a smile of plain good humor, from the dimple beside the mouth to the crinkled crow’s-feet around the eye; the right had a sneering upper lip and a shrewd gaze.

I stared at her with distrust, and she stopped smiling. Then all at once I saw her whole again, and saw her fondness for me, and no longer doubted it. I tried to tell her how grateful I was for the way she’d cared for me, always there when I awoke, and while I fumbled to speak she waited with a pained, patient expression. But the words were too distant, and I couldn’t reach them. When I wept in frustration she kissed the back of my hand. Never mind, dear heart, she said. Never mind.

I awoke in the night to find a priestess leaning over me, guarding a candle flame with her hand. A gust of wind made wax drip on my arm. We stared at each other, the priestess and I. She wore a diadem of coiled copper wire over a wimple. She touched my unbound hair, like in color to the burnished wire, and then my left cheek. She muttered a blessing over me and went away.

I sat up gingerly. Mai slept on the deck beside me, her cloak draped about the peaks of her hips and shoulders like the folds of a mountain’s skirts. I felt for the pouch I’d kept hidden under my kirtle, and then recalled that Mai had given me a cloth sack. I tugged it out from under my bodice and found the divining compass pouch inside the sack, nestled amidst the coins.

I tipped the bones into my palm, glad I hadn’t lost them. I felt the touch of the Dame and Na. One placed her hand on my arm, the other on the crown of my head, so softly I could almost mistake the feeling for the caress of the wind. I wept for gratitude that they had not left me. And I wept for pity that they were dead, and I’d never see them again in this life.

I spread out the divining compass on my lap, and kissed the bones and cast them, and leaned closer to peer at the godsigns, to see which avatars the Dame and Na had singled out. And I discovered I could no longer read. The godsigns around the horizon of the compass were mere marks, no sense attached to them. The Dame had taught me to read, and with that gift she’d honored me and raised me above her other servants. I’d prized the knowledge, and now it was gone.

Sire Rodela’s buzz had faded until I almost forgot to hear him. Now he began to whine in delight, louder, nearer, taunting.

It was a clear night. I looked up and searched for the godsigns writ in the stars by the gods, the constellations we copied in ink, making dots large or small according to whether the stars were bright or dim. The skyfield was so much more intricate than I remembered; I could find too many patterns, patterns upon patterns, and all meaningless.

If I couldn’t recognize the godsigns, could I remember the gods and their avatars? I counted them on my fingers, starting with Ardor, though I couldn’t tell which sign on the painted compass belonged to the god. First Ardor Wildfire. Then Ardor Smith. What was the third avatar, the woman? I couldn’t remember, nor could I summon the name of another god. Wildfire had stolen my speech, the godsigns, and knowledge of other gods. Was Ardor so jealous?

I stared at the divining compass. How satisfied I’d been, when I painted those circles and lines, and inscribed each arcant with the name of a god, to think that I was re-creating within this small compass the orderly arrangement of the world. I might as well have tried to draw fixed lines upon the surface of the water. The tiny circle contained a vast deep sea, a place of currents and turbulence. Gods moved within it, nameless to me now, nothing to divide them, nothing to contain them. Uncertainty spilled outward from the compass, and I feared I would wander in this unmapped ignorance forever.

Warriors carried torches and swords and pikes through the streets of a town. The stuccoed buildings were three and four stories high, side by side and face-to-face along a narrow cobbled street so steep that in places it became a stairway. Painted wooden balconies were on fire above me, and flames and smoke and screams billowed through the fretwork shutters. A carved blue door burned and broke away from its top hinge. There were bonfires in the streets, heaps of blazing furniture with bodies discarded upon them. The stink of pyres.

I was little. I knew I wasn’t supposed to make a sound, but I was sobbing. A linen chest lay open on its side, white cloth spilling into the mucky gutter. Down the street a woman sprawled on the ground. I couldn’t see her face because her skirts had been pulled up over her head. Only her red hair was showing. Her bare legs and belly were smeared with blood. One knee was up, the other down. One arm was bent backward under her, the other stretched out, the palm open and empty.

Sparks and embers ate holes in the linen that used to be kept safe in the chest in the house. I watched a wisp of smoke forming above it. Warriors ran past me, making a joyous uproar that didn’t sound human; they wore helmets, and their faces were hidden behind visors shaped like animal snouts. Wildfire loose in the town.

I fled the dream, and woke to find the uproar was real. Soldiers and sailors aboard ship were whooping and bellowing. The glad news spread throughout the fleet by way of shouts and drumbeats; three lanterns were lit on every prow. The men sent ahead had taken the town and secured the port. Lanx was ours.

It was early morning. The sea and sky ahead shone a luminous blue, divided, one from the other, by a dull uneven gray line. Land.

The sun sent low rays across the water, and the land took on color and shape. We sighted the walls and spires of Lanx, and as we drew nearer, their stone turned from gray to gold in the sunlight—a golden city on steep hills, held fast between two branches of a wide river on its way to the sea.

CHAPTER 2

Marked

Oarsmen rowed us into harbor. The passengers stared and pointed and exclaimed at the wonders of Lanx—the towering lighthouse, the quays lined with two-story arcades, the palatial gilded barges, the squalid hutboats moored side by side so that people strolled across the decks as if they were streets, the massive iron water gates that spanned the murky reaches where the river emptied into the sea—and all that was just the harbor, beyond which was a most marvelous city of bridges and towers, with houses piled so high that one’s doorstep was another’s rooftop.

Lanx was the first city I ever saw, and I couldn’t endure the sight of it—or the smell either, from shoals of debris stinking of shit and tanneries and dead fish. I lay down under my shaggy old cloak and pulled it close around my ears.

To see was to be bewildered, and I was weary to my marrow of bewilderment. Curiosity had plagued and served me all my life. I hardly knew myself without it.

Gulls alighted in the rigging and jested and laughed their harsh, mocking laughs. I swear I could understand them nearly as well as I could understand people—which is to say, not well. As the fleet assembled in the harbor, sailors counted the stragglers to see how many ships had been lost to the storm. Foot soldiers and cataphracts alike wagered on whether the queenmother’s ships or the king’s would be first past the water gates, for their precedence would be telling. The long day passed in gossiping and waiting, and I dozed, rocking in my cradle.

The whiphands whistled and oars dipped and rose with sparkling pendants of water drops, and we glided between the open gates. We turned from the broad river into a narrow stone-walled channel, and the hills rose up around us, close enough that a man looking down from his doorstep could spit on us. One man did just that. A boy on a drawbridge threw a handful of stones that skittered across the deck. Women watched us from small square windows, half hidden behind latticework shutters. Someone jeered. I cared for none of it. None of it. Only let me find Galan, let him be alive.

Mai’s old dog settled down beside me and gave me a wistful look so I would scratch under his chin. In time we both slept.

Perhaps I was still asleep when we landed, for what I recall is a dream of streets and stairs, daylight and darkness. Pain was the one sure thing, the wedge splitting my left temple, and the rope twisted around my chest so that I labored to breathe. My arms and legs tingled and went numb. The hissing in my left ear went on without pause.

Aboard the ship sleep had been my healer; I’d slept and slept and each time I’d awakened with some small gain. I could move my right hand, and smile somewhat from both sides of my face, and understand speech without puzzling at it word by word. These small victories had misled me into believing that I was meant to live. Now the pains in my head and chest told me I’d taken too much for granted. Wildfire might yet kill me.

Mai said, Getupgetup, we’ve found out where Sire Galan is quartered!

I forgot to be glad he was alive, because I forgot I’d ever doubted it. I was fearful instead. Galan wouldn’t want what lightning had made of me. Why would he desire a lopsided sheath, weak and muddled, too backward in mind, too forward in chasing after him?

I don’t remember saying good-bye to Mai, but I must have done so. I left a warm room and struggled up steep narrow streets paved with crushed white shells. The ground seemed to tilt as it had on the ship, and I shuffled along afraid of losing my balance. It was dark down between the high walls, but above, the heavens shone the pure lapis blue of twilight. I stopped to catch my breath, and looked up to see doves fly across the ribbon of sky overhead as suddenly as if they’d been flung. I swayed, and a man let me lean on him. That was Tir, Sire Torosus’s jack. He was long legged and impatient. They had sent five men to escort me to Sire Galan’s quarters. I didn’t think to wonder why so many.

Someone lit a lamp behind a high window, a square of yellow brilliance in a dark wall. I saw a woman silhouetted against the light as she closed the shutters. Wind dodged around corners and harried us.

We climbed many stairs in a tower. Sire Galan’s room was cold and deserted. Tir and a cantankerous porter with a smoking torch went away and left me alone in the dark. I dropped my cloak in a heap by the door. Thick panes of glass, inset in the fletch-patterned shutters, silvered in the moon’s radiance. The room was crowded with furniture, more than could be useful, and the tables and chairs had the delicacy and slender legs of the palfreys they breed for dames to ride; I was used to sturdier stuff. A bed with latticed walls stood on a platform three steps above the floor. Sire Galan’s baggage squatted here and there, dark barrels and sacks and baskets. His camp cot had been unfolded in a corner.

I crossed the floor to a niche in the stone wall that served as a hearth. A clay statue of Ardor Hearthkeeper knelt in a smaller niche above it. Her name came to mind so easily now; I marveled that I could have forgotten it. Though her dress was glazed clay, her headcloth was made of real silk. One end of the cloth was draped over her face, concealing one eye and her mouth, for she is a keeper of secrets.

The spark, ever ready, is one of her many gifts to us. I took the flint from the statue’s outstretched hands and kindled a small fire using apple wood I found in a basket. I stood unmoving before it, in a state of prayer no less prayer for being wordless, in gratitude for the warmth of Hearthkeeper’s embrace, the loving touch of fire tamed and contained. I felt the constriction loosen around my chest, easing the passage of my breath. Fire curved around the logs, a veil of orange and blue, and flames pried their way under bark and licked out through every crack, and I watched as the wood was transmuted to garnets and rubies. Such beauty, I couldn’t look away. Hearthkeeper whispered to me: Burn bright, burn fast. Give what light you can, the rest is ash.

Much later I heard the door open, and I turned away from the embers. A woman entered, carrying a basket overflowing with white linen. She set it down on Sire Galan’s cot, saying, Who are you? She spoke in the High, but she rounded and clipped the words oddly. Her gown was thin as a harlot’s, showing her nipples and woman’s beard like shadows through gauze dyed the yellow-green of willow leaves in spring. Galan had given me a headcloth of that color—the green that signifies beginning—when he and I were new together. Had Sire Galan already taken a whore into his bed, or put another sheath in my place?

"Who are you?" I said, using the Low, the language of mudfolk, thinking she was vain to use the High. Did she suppose I’d mistake her for one of the Blood?

What? She spoke again in the High. Her face had not been unfriendly before. Now it was.

I tried the High this time: "Who are you?"

She pursed her lips and was silent. Her eyes were outlined with black ink and she had yellowing bruises on her face and around her neck.

I saw she wouldn’t answer before I did. I’m, I’m Firetorn. I’m Sire…Sire Galleon’s grief— I heard myself and winced. No, that’s the way wrong. I mean to say his his his… I couldn’t find the right word—or any word—so I made a lewd gesture that anyone could understand.

Why don’t you just say it—you’re Sire Galan’s codpiece, aren’t you? Are you too proud? The woman took a candlestick from a ledge above the cot and lit the taper, and came close to me. You must like the dark, she said. What’s that, a birthmark?

I touched my face. She was peering at my left cheek, but it was the right side that was lopsided. Perhaps I had a burn there, though it didn’t feel sore. No. I don’t know. We were crossing in the swarm, there was riled ire…dire and dirdam everywhere and rumble thumping. It was thudderbright…thunderbright, that’s what did it! I made a zigzag gesture and struck myself on the chest, pleased to have come upon the exact word I needed. You see? Thunderbright!

Why do you talk that way? Are you a clack?

A what?

A clack. A dimwit.

I looked at her closely to see how cruel she meant to be, and saw she did make mock of me, but indifferently. If she’d been jealous, there’d have been more malice in it. Either she was sure of Sire Galan, or she was not his. I said, "So what are you? A…a horse? Not a horse, no, but one that men ride, any many men—a hole? Whole?"

I’m not a whore, if that’s what you mean. She crimped her lips together and shook her head. She lit another candle, and carried her small bloom of light to golden doves that perched in the branches of a tall bronze tree. She put fire in their open beaks and I saw they were oil lamps. She kept her back to me and her motions were as eloquent as her face.

Now we were both offended, and what did that serve? I said, Nor am I a a dum…dimdolt. What happened to me—the thunderdolt is what’s wrong. Blighting, brightening stuck me and killed me dead. But I woke up. Now my speak is tonguesy-turvy.

The woman turned and beckoned me to a chair near the bronze tree hung with lamps. I could see how, with some effort, she put aside her vexation. I sat, and she sat nearby.

I am called Penna, she said. I serve Sire Edecon—as his codpiece, I suppose. And his laundress. One eyebrow went up. I admired the bold black strokes of her eyebrows, arched like the wings of a shearwater, and how each could swoop and rise on its own. It was easier to admire her now that I knew she did not belong to Galan.

Sire Addlecon? Who’s that?

If you’re Sire Galan’s tart, how is it you don’t know that Sire Edecon is his armiger?

But Sire Galant’s…his man, you know the one, the man who fights besight him, on his shy side, his shield side—his, his…halibut, his hatbringer—that man is dead.

She laughed. That’s a fine way to put it. His halibut! His armiger is very much alive and upright, I can attest to it.

Is it a new harbinger then?

Penna shrugged as if she didn’t understand. I could see she’d not been told of Sire Rodela, the armiger who’d served Sire Galan so badly. To think of Rodela was to hear him buzz, a sound lurking behind every other sound.

No doubt this Sire Edecon had been with the troop of Crux all along, but I couldn’t place his name. Had he been armiger to one of the cataphracts who’d died in the Marchfield, and therefore in need of a new master? I was quite ready to dislike him if he was the one who’d injured Penna. I pointed to her bruises and asked, Is that his?

Her mouth turned down. She got up and moved away from me. She took a shirt from the basket and gave it a hard snap to shake it out. She draped it over the back of a chair, where it took the shape of a man with dangling arms. Soon the room was full of these pale phantoms.

Noise in the corridor, voices and footsteps.

I stood and braced myself against a table, my breath coming fast. Under my fingers I felt tiny ridges of marquetry on the tabletop, an inlay of ivory and shell. The footsteps stopped outside the room. I could smell the smoke of pitch-pine torches and see a thread of light under the door. The voices went on, two or three men talking at once, saying farewell, and one voice cut through the others, clear laughter on a rising note, unsullied by cares. The door opened and the room filled with men, shadows crossing the light. One of the men had torchlight tangled in the curls that sprang free from under his cap. Golden threads glinted in his surcoat.

The voices stopped abruptly.

Galan took a few more steps into the room. Someone raised a torch and put it in a bracket by the door. There were but four men, though they’d seemed a multitude: Sire Galan, his two jacks, and a man I supposed was Sire Edecon. I couldn’t remember the names of his jacks, no matter that I knew the men well.

One straight look from Galan, and there might have been no others in the room. How could I have forgotten this look, this considering look, and how he could transfix me with it? He had a private smile hidden somewhere about his eyes, not worn on the lips for all to see. He seemed to take my measure, not to tally up my faults, but to savor what he held dear. What was his. What he might do. It was the welcome I’d hoped to find, and never counted on. For that moment I believed I was whatever he saw in me.

He said, I met the Crux’s ships. You weren’t with them.

Perhaps he’d forgotten that he tried to send me away. I shrugged. I couldn’t trust myself to explain.

Now he was grinning. I thought maybe you’d come, because I know how you are—stubborn. You traveled with Sire Torosus’s woman, is that it?

I shrugged again. But I couldn’t help smiling.

I’ll find out, he said, laughing, and crossed the room in a few long paces and pushed the table aside. I saw a new scar, still raw and red, just under the green dots of the clan tattoo on his cheek. He put his arms around my waist and pulled me against him and I felt a shiver and shock pass between us that left the sweat prickling on my skin. I’d felt that before when we touched, and now I knew it for what it was: lightning’s caress, Wildfire surging in the blood. I tasted the wine Galan had drunk, his full lower lip, his curving upper lip, and I was a starveling at a feast, my kisses all hunger and gluttony, and his were the same.

Galan released me and took a step back. Now he saw me up close, and there was something more—and less—than gladness on his face. Upright furrows appeared over the bridge of his nose, and his mouth tightened. Such a slight alteration, to make such a difference.

What’s this? He touched my cheek.

Thunderbright! I made the gesture I’d made for Penna, two fingers pointing and zigzagging through the air, striking myself on the chest. On the way, the waves, the…swimming flying thing, the the the—

The what? Galan frowned. It frightened me.

One of the jacks muttered, She sounds a proper naught-wit, or half-wit, anyway. That was Spiller talking: I knew his name now and that of Galan’s other jack, Rowney, just as I knew Spiller was fond of his own wit even when others failed to admire it.

Sire Edecon looked at me over Galan’s shoulder. He had straight hair the color of wheat straw and a fair beard. His nose was crooked and flattened, probably broken more than once, giving him the rakish look of a man who likes a good brawl. He said, Is it a tattoo?

I covered my cheek. I couldn’t imagine what caused such wonderment.

It’s no tattoo, said Galan. I don’t know what it is.

It was thunderbright, thunderbright! My voice rose. I was convinced I had the right word, and didn’t know why they failed to understand. In on the…float—the boat, the ship, there was a…harm, there was flicking everywhere.

A harm? You mean a shipwreck?

"No, a harm—with clouts and snow and will and terrible, terrible…" I gestured, showing the turmoil in the air.

A storm?

Yes, and it licked me, you see?

Galan flinched. It pained him to hear me speak.

Perhaps she means lightning, Sire, said Penna, coming up behind Sire Edecon. She wasn’t shy, that one. I think she was struck by lightning.

You were struck by lightning aboard ship? He spoke slowly, as if he feared I couldn’t understand.

I nodded. My face was numb.

How can it be lightning? You aren’t burned.

I looked down. Did he doubt me? Wildfire had marred me, made my speech foolish and my body feeble. Surely he could see and hear for himself that I’d been wounded.

And you lived. He pulled at the buckles of his baldric, and Spiller came forward to help him. Galan gestured him away. He dropped the baldric on the table and the hilts of his weapons clattered against the inlaid tabletop: the greater sword, the lesser, the mercy dagger.

Well, so—here I am, I said, gesturing to myself, trying to smile. But I think my start stopped…I don’t know. And and and when I broke up, I was all in a fuddle, a fussle—a muckle. I covered my mouth so he wouldn’t see how my smile sagged on one side into a frown. So he wouldn’t know how ugly I’d become.

Galan reached for me and I hid my face against his shoulder and neck. His surcoat was thick with embroidery and gold-wrapped threads. I took in the smell of him and began to cry. A judging self observed my wailing and whimpering, remembering how Galan had reckoned me unfit to be his companion in wartime—and now I was. Ardor Wildfire had made me so.

Galan held himself stiffly, as if he were angry. His arms were hard and confining. But one of his hands pressed the small of my back, and the other, under my shoulder blade, began to rub in small circles, as a horsemaster rubs a restive horse. At last I quieted enough to match the rhythm of my breath to his. I wiped my face on the abundant sleeve of Mai’s gown.

Galan’s voice was muffled against my headcloth. I’ll keep you safe if I can, even from the gods themselves.

The bed’s high wooden walls were pierced with a pattern of stars and swallows. We climbed up onto the mattress, which crackled and smelled of some sweet herb, and Galan drew the curtain behind us and we were in a room within the room. He put his sword, unsheathed, on a narrow ledge along the wall of the bed, and hung his mercy dagger from a hook. A lantern inset with amber glass spilled light on white linens and a fur blanket and treasures heaped and scattered about: coins and golden cups and gossamer silk stitched with gems. I sat down cross-legged and picked up a coral box inlaid with a silver boat and silver net. The workmanship was so fine, I wondered if the artisans here were people like myself, or belonged to a race with nimbler fingers and keener eyes.

These luxuries were his plunder from the battle, I supposed. But the luxury I treasured was to be with Galan, and be alone with him. For too long we had slept in a tent with his men, and nothing to hide us from them at night but the bedcovers. Now he knelt with his back to me, his shirt hanging loose about him as he searched for something. I put my hand on the bare skin of his calf and wondered if it was still my privilege to touch him as I pleased.

Galan turned and said, Here, this is for you. He held a mirror before me, and I misunderstood, thinking it a strange sort of gift to show me to myself.

I’d sometimes peered in the Dame’s mirror, but she hadn’t cared to be reminded that she was plain, and her bronze mirror had been tarnished and dim. This one had a disk with a flawless sheen. It seemed more a window than a mirror, as if I looked through glass at someone else. The woman looked so strange, so stricken. It was hard to find myself in her.

The right side of the face was a mask, with the mouth turned down and the eye hiding like a shy cunning creature under the drooping eyelid. On the left, the eyebrow and eyelashes were singed away, and there was a glitter of fear and surprise in the tiny black mirror of the pupil.

And on the left cheek, the mark that had caused so much wonderment: jagged lines radiated from a spot near the outward corner of my left eye, branching and branching again into finer lines, like frost feathers, like lightning itself, if lightning could be stilled. I touched my face, following the widest bolt, which went over my jaw and neck. The lines were as ruddy as burns, but they weren’t raised proud to the touch like a blister or a welt.

I’d been branded as plainly by Ardor Wildfire as were the Blood of the god’s own clan, who had Ardor’s godsign tattooed on their cheeks as infants. I’d never seen or heard of such a mark; would it fade, or stay with me for life?

Galan watched me, and I wondered that he looked at me the way he used to do, though I was so much altered. I put the mirror facedown on the bed.

He tugged on the coppery cord Mai had used to bind up the folds of the gown, and the knot came undone at once. She was a clever woman, and I daresay she’d tied the cord just so, thinking of the untying of it. Galan smiled, saying, Why are you wearing this? Where are your clothes?

My mouth was dry. My own was was— I took off my headcloth, and my hair, released from the wool, crackled and rose around my head like a cloud. I spread out the cloth to show him that it was a scrap of the pine green dress he’d had made for me, and how it was tattered and charred.

Gods, he said, putting his hands in my hair and pulling me closer, pulling me down onto his plunder. He lifted himself on an elbow and pushed everything aside. I found a dagger with a jeweled sheath under my back and laughed as I threw it away.

Wait, he said, and he knelt and blew out the lantern, and I saw his prick standing upright under his shirt. But when he lay on his back in the dark he did nothing but hold me and stroke my shoulder. He tucked my head under his chin. The lamplight outside made its way through the pierced wooden walls of the bed, casting wavering stars and swallows with flickering wings over his white shirt and the bedclothes. Someone in the room beyond picked at a dulcet without making a tune.

His prick had softened. I put my hand under his shirt, on his thigh. Why not?

He muttered, You’re hurt.

I thought: he doesn’t want me now. That was my fear, whispering in a voice like Sire Rodela’s.

Whores had taught me how to be brazen; I’d heard them bantering about what to do if a man flagged. I would not be shy. With my fist and little nips from my teeth, I showed Galan I didn’t want him to be too careful.

Galan gave a choked-off laugh and said, You thief, you little thief! and I didn’t understand why he said it, nor did I care, for he turned to me, suddenly impatient. If I was bold enough to challenge him, he had an answer for it. I was swimming in the folds of Mai’s dress, and he rucked up my skirts and pinned me down. I dug my fingers into his buttocks and felt his muscles harden as he pushed his way in. My quim was slippery and he slid in tight, and the breath went out of me. The bristles on the ridge of his jaw rasped against my tongue.

As he bore down on me, he said again I was a thief, the thief of his peace, and I knew he was angry after all at my disobedience, but it didn’t frighten me. For once our moods did not quarrel; he wanted to take and I was of a mind to yield, or perhaps he wanted to give and I was ready to take, it was all the same. I was glad I could speak in the fluent language of touch. I tangled my fingers in the lattice and turned my head and let him ride, and gods, how sweet that was, after misspeaking and misunderstanding and missing him. He breathed into the ear I’d turned to him, his breath coming harsher and faster, and hidden in it the sound of my name.

Afterward we laughed that we’d been so hasty. By then the lamps and candles were out in the room beyond the bed, and we saw by hearth glow and moonlight. I slipped out of Mai’s dress and pulled the money sack over my head. Galan took off his shirt. He had a bandage on his back—I’d felt it under his shirt—and I asked how bad the wound was, and how he’d come by it. He said it was nothing. Chance had looked out for him in the battle, and so had Sire Edecon, who’d fought commendably well.

Galan was too offhand. I remembered how he used to brag of his deeds in tourneys of courtesy, and wondered if he found something distasteful in boasting now that the killing had started. I didn’t ask questions where questions were unwelcome, and so I banished what I didn’t care to know. It was easily done.

He had bruises and nicks in plenty, and I could match him, for when the lightning had hurled me across the deck, I’d landed hard. Besides the new knife-shaped burn on my hip, the strike had reopened old wounds, the burns on my back and shoulders I’d gotten when Ardor’s men set fire to Galan’s tent, and the flayed strip at my crotch where Sire Rodela had taken his trophy of flesh and hair. The scabs had split open, and likewise the pinkish new skin growing under the scabs. Lightning had searched out my raw places. I hadn’t felt the old wounds amidst the pains of the new, until Galan made too much of them.

I lay on my stomach with my head pillowed on my arms, aching everywhere, and all my sinews seemed tightly wound around the spindles of my bones. Galan sat beside me and stroked the ridge of my spine, and slowly the tightness eased. His hand stilled, resting on the small of my back. He said, I shouldn’t have tried to send you home.

Don’t again, I said.

I thought you’d be safer there, without me. I began to believe Chance wanted too much for the luck she gave me, that she meant to take your life in exchange for preserving mine. But I think—

What?

A gift from a god is never without price, but to refuse a god’s gift—that too has a price.

Hazard Chance: I remembered her now, a wooden statue on an altar in the Marchfield, clad in russet paint. She wears a blindfold to dispense good or bad luck, but everyone knows she peeks from time to time, and loves a bold man as much as she despises a cautious one. She’s partial to redheads too, that’s why Sire Galan had taken me for his sheath after the UpsideDown Days—he thought I was a talisman, a token of her favor. That was an old hurt, one that should have healed long ago. Now it pained me again.

When Galan had left me behind, he left behind his luck. So he had believed.

He crossed his arms, making fists of his hands. I reached for him, but he raised his left hand to stop me. I saw a brief flicker of a mocking smile. It seems the gods taunt us. You’re not Chance’s gift after all; Ardor, the god of my enemy, has claimed you—claimed you for all the world to see.

"I’m not your empty." I caught his hand and brought it close, for I’d seen a mark in the center of his palm, a russet tattoo about the size of my thumb:

What’s this?

An offering, Galan said.

But what is it, what does it say?

I thought you could read.

I could, but now, now no more…I know it’s a a…baudkin, or or knotsign—

Godsign?

Yes, that’s it—godsight—but to me it seems just notsense. So? What does it say?

Ah. Before the battle I made a promise to Hazard: I dedicated my left hand to Chance and my right to Fate.

He let me pry open his right fist. I leaned over his palm. Inscribed on his skin were the lines with which he was born, minute and delicate whorls, and the creases and calluses he’d made by his deeds, by years of grasping weapons and reins, taking and letting go. What was this labyrinth in his palm, if not a map of what he was born to do and what he had chosen to do? And at the center of the labyrinth, the godsign of Fate. I recognized it now, recalling how Hazard’s stars had always looked to me like a skein of geese in flight. The wavy line underneath meant an elemental avatar:

I knew there were syllables to go with the signs on his palms. I couldn’t recall them; reading was still denied to me. But Ardor Wildfire had been merciful and had restored the god Hazard to my memory.

I looked up to find Galan watching me with one eyebrow cocked. A chill raised gooseflesh on my arms. A dedication, he called it, but it seemed arrogant to me, as if he claimed to deal Fate with one hand, Chance with the other. And besides, it seemed almost a womanish thing to do, marking himself with the indelible sign of another god, the way a dame receives the godsign of her husband on her cheek when she marries outclan. He’d courted Hazard Chance a long time—did he mean to wed her now? She might smile on his presumption. She does love a dare.

I couldn’t risk a quarrel, being without the means to speak my mind. Instead I asked—and I meant it to be sharp, though it was blunt by the time I finished—Where is the other, the third thing of the god, the third…vanity, avanitte? Is the sign on your…prink, your prankle there? Hmm? I pointed to his dangle.

He grinned and reached for his longsword, a new sword and a fine one, with a hilt covered in pebbled hide and ornamented in golden fish. He turned the blade to show me the engraving of Hazard Peril’s godsign: The upward slash of a male avatar was a deep gouge that marred the otherwise perfect steel.

Galan put the sword back on the ledge beside the mattress and I scowled at him. So why? Have you become a beast now? No—I mean a prill, a priest. Do you claim to do dog’s bidding?

It isn’t a claim. It’s an offering. He looked down at his hands again, as the right one concealed the left. His grin faded. "I offered Hazard my hands and my blade,